Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor device and a power conversion device, and particularly to a semiconductor device as an inverter module having a structure in which a high-side semiconductor element and a low-side semiconductor element face each other, and a power conversion device including the semiconductor device.
Description of the Background Art
With reduction in size of an inverter module, reduction in area of mounting on a substrate on the customer's premises has been strongly requested of the inverter module. In order to respond to such a request, a conventional inverter module has pursued reduction in size and increase in performance of a semiconductor chip to reduce the area of mounting on a substrate on the customer's premises. However, in the conventional inverter module, a switching element and a freewheeling diode are mounted on the same plane. Therefore, in a study of the module size, it is necessary to reduce the size of the semiconductor chip having the switching element and the like mounted thereon.
In order to obtain the properties equivalent to those of a non-miniaturized inverter module, an inverter module having a miniaturized semiconductor chip requires increase in performance of the semiconductor chip. However, it is difficult to make the performance of the miniaturized semiconductor chip better than the performance of the semiconductor chip prior to miniaturization. Therefore, there are limitations to reducing the substrate mounting area in the conventional inverter module using the above-described method.
Thus, Japanese Patent Laying-Open No. 2013-038105, for example, discloses the technique of reducing a substrate mounting area of an inverter module by stacking a low-side semiconductor chip including a low-side electrode on a high-side semiconductor chip including a high-side electrode. The low-side electrode and the high-side electrode in the inverter module driven by high power refer to electrodes that receive a low potential side and a high potential side of a DC voltage, respectively.